Marvel is making a habit of giving the fans what they’ve asked for, just not quite how they expected it. Bring back Fox’s X-Men characters in Deadpool & Wolverine! Ok, here’s Channing Tatum’s Gambit. Give us more Robert Downey Jr.! Fine, we’ll cast him as Doctor Doom. A lot of fan castings and theories have ultimately become canon, too like John Krasinski as Reed Richards and — at long last — the inclusion of Mephisto.
Agatha All Along just went and delivered what many fans thought WandaVision was going to do back in 2021 and introduced Marvel’s resident big red demon guy Mephisto into the MCU for the first time. All right, so he hasn’t actually appeared on screen yet, but the fact that he’s been name-dropped must surely mean he’s right around the corner, yes?
Well, maybe, but also maybe not. It’s just possible Marvel is actually resurrecting a trick it first attempted a full decade ago, in one of its most acclaimed projects.
Mephisto, Captain America, Doctor Strange, oh my! We need to talk about Marvel’s name drops
In Agatha All Along episode 3, Jennifer Kale talks to Teen about the rumors of what happened to Agatha Harkness’ son. “They say he might be dead,” she teases. “Others say he might be a demon… Or an agent of Mephisto.” Cue the colossal sound of a thousand chronically online Marvel fans’ jaws hitting the floor.
Even so, while this namedrop may lead many to assume the Hell-Lord will be turning up later this season, Marvel history urges caution. It’s very possible that this reference is more along the lines of a memorable moment from 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier (see above). This sequence sees Captain America and Black Widow getting information on HYDRA’s surveillance algorithm, with turncoat S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jasper Sitwell admitting they’ve used it to target people who will become a threat to HYDRA. “Bruce Banner, Stephen Strange…” he babbles, thereby offering the MCU its first nod to the future Master of the Mystic Arts.
So did Doctor Strange show up in The Winter Soldier, or even any other Marvel movie that came out that year? No, no, he did not — in fact, it took until 2016 for his origins film to come out. What this namedrop did do is confirm that he existed out there on Earth-616 somewhere, which could be all this Mephisto moment is doing, too.
EP Jac Schaeffer’s comments about the reference suggest it could go either way. “With these shows, so often there is something that is at once a joke and a wink and a nod, and actually has something legitimate underneath it,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “As we all know, Mephisto is a character who’s very wrapped into Agatha’s storyline. I mean, people have to watch, but we’re always playing with the audience in that way.”
Maybe Mephisto will show up, but if he doesn’t — despite this tactic following a successful blueprint — Marvel should probably be prepared for fans to get hella mad.